Over at Pier 92, the Emergency Operations Center was chock-full of teams that flew in from Microsoft and other large information-technology companies. Tom Brondolo invited the consulting teams over to OCME to see if they could help with our operation. Unfortunately, almost all of them had to be sent packing: many of them wanted to do three studies and a planning document for every little task they might be assigned. They meant well, but if they’d been our main team, we’d still be holding meetings.
In contrast, our four gunslingers, as they liked to call themselves, attacked the problems directly and with amazing speed. They got the job done.
The Incident Command Center also evolved in terms of function as we added more tasks to those we were already doing. New ones included arranging shipping and travel for remains and DNA samples, assisting families in various ways, and maintaining a twenty-four-hour-a-day telephone hotline. As the manager of the Incident Command Center, I had to categorize in my mind all the 9/11-related operations we were simultaneously handling, in order to keep them all going at once.
The tasks broke down into five major groups.
The first, of course, was the gathering of postmortem information from the remains, from bloody clothing that came in, and from other personal effects, and processing these through the system. Where and when was the item or part found? At the site or at the landfill? By whom, if that were known? (If it had been found at the site, the grid location was also recorded: FDNY had overlaid a grid map on the entire site, dividing the work areas into seventy-by-seventy-foot squares.) A toe-tag number was assigned at the site, and to this, at the OCME processing area, the remains would then have a DM number added, a DNA number, and a number from Evidence would also be given to any personal property taken from the remains. Sometimes when a body bag was opened at the processing area, three separate parts would be found inside. Each would receive a separate DM number, even though they all had the same toe-tag number. For complex headaches like these, our highly flexible computer program and its ingenious operators proved essential.
The second task was processing the antemortem stream of information that came mainly from the families in the Victim Identification Profiles. At the Family Assistance Center, thousands of these seven-page Victim Identification Profile forms were filled out—on paper—during interviews with police officials. In addition, important information also came to us from the employers of the victims, from nongovernmental organizations such as the Red Cross and Salvation Army, from foreign governments whose citizens had been killed, and from police departments and AGs’ offices across the United States. To transcribe the data, 180 DMORT volunteers sat in an area of the Emergency Operations Center called the blue dot area (because you needed a blue dot on your ID badge to get in) and, working sixty at a time at as many computer stations, entered the information from the Victim Identification Profile forms. Even though we worked around the clock, the task still took almost two months to complete.
Once the information was entered, we faced another Herculean task: “washing” the data, cleaning out errors, and consolidating multiple reports on the same person. In one instance, a man who feared that his brother had been killed in the WTC made eleven such reports. The day after the bombings, he left his home in Baltimore, Maryland, determined to reach New York and either find his brother or report him missing. Aware of how long it might take him to get into New York because of the travel restrictions in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, he started the ball rolling by reporting his brother missing to the Baltimore police. During his journey to New York, this well-meaning man stopped and re-reported his brother as a missing person at least twice more, in different police jurisdictions, and also told the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. On reaching New York City, he made at least a half dozen more reports, for instance at the local police precinct in the area of his brother’s residence and then at the Family Assistance Center. When finished, he had created eleven reports about his brother, each with enough variation in detail and spelling to get entered into the database as a unique record with its own case number.
To tease out and eliminate the redundant reports and consolidate the eleven records into one was an enormously time-consuming task. At one point, there were over sixty thousand official missing person reports in our system—which averages out to around twenty-two reports per victim, each of them generated by a well-meaning “reporter” (as we called them) determined to ensure that his friend or family member did not get overlooked.
One aspect of the antemortem stream over which we at OCME had no control was the taking of DNA samples from victims’ families. By executive decree from the mayor’s office, this was being done by the NYPD. They had argued to City Hall that they knew how to do it and had more manpower available for the task than we did. We at OCME thought this was a bad idea, arguing that collecting DNA samples from families without a medically-trained person present was fraught with potential dangers. We pointed out that we were expert in taking DNA samples, having had loads of experience producing “exemplars” for court cases. Despite our protests, the NYPD managed to keep OCME personnel away from the DNA collection process. In one incident, I later heard, one of our DNA experts tried to sit in on some DNA-collecting sessions with victim families at the Family Assistance Center and was actually escorted out the door by cops.
Our third task, devolving from the first two, was developing a missing persons list. Mass disasters are of two types: Some are classified as “closed universes”; others as “open universes.” An example of a closed-universe disaster is a plane crash, where the passenger manifest tells us precisely how many people were on the plane, who they were, and even where they were sitting. An open-universe disaster is one where we do not know how many people were killed nor who they were. The WTC attacks created the mother of all open-universe disasters.
The WTC buildings were not only incredibly large but also completely open to the public, a major tourist destination, and the center of a mass transit hub. The WTC was like a small city, complete with shops, restaurants, and other businesses catering to the public. Messengers, fast-food and flower delivery people, UPS, FedEx, photocopy repairmen—the list was endless. Little wonder that early estimates of the number of dead were so high. There was no way of predicting what the foot traffic in that building actually was.
In developing a missing persons list, the OCME was trying to close the most open of open-universe disasters, in part through the work of a committee whose birth was never mandated by the mayor or by any other ranking city official. It came into being as its members, all charged with the day-to-day tasks of working with the victims or their families, recognized the need for a coordinated effort. The working group that we formed continued to operate for close to three years. Members included Inspector (now Chief) Jerry Quinlan of the NYPD, Deputy Commissioner Tommy Curitore of the Mayor’s Community Assistance Unit, Deputy Commissioner Bradford Billet of the Mayor’s Commission to the United Nations, and myself. The Fire Department also sent a representative to many of our meetings, and later on police officials working on WTC fraud cases joined our group.
The prime goal of the “Reported Missing” committee was to establish an official list broken down into two major victim categories: Reported Missing and Confirmed Dead. Victims achieved the status of Reported Missing after the committee verified that the missing person report was genuine, that such a person existed and had likely perished. Victims were confirmed dead by one of two mechanisms: (1) after having their bodies identified, (2) in the absence of remains having a death certificate issued by judicial decree. The Confirmed Dead portion of the list became the focus of intense media scrutiny—and we were very careful in adding names to this category because those names inevitably appeared the next morning on the front pages of newspapers around the world.
The plethora of agencies involved and the multitude of pathways onto the list had created a system with too many numbers. A family member would call the police and report a loved
one missing; at the end of the conversation, he or she would get a T number that stood for the telephone report. Later the same family would have an interview at the Family Assistance Center and receive a P number for that personal interview. Then OCME would give them a DX number on the judicial decree death certificate, which the family could add to the L number that the Law Department gave them for their affidavit. And so on, and on, and on. A family might easily rack up close to twenty different case numbers reporting one victim; families with multiple victims could have even more.
We knew that if we were ever to get control of the situation and bring together all the different agencies’ databases, we’d need a super number to “roll-up” all those other numbers and their associated data into one master database. Part of designing the missing persons list also meant that the committee had to create that super number—called the Reported Missing (RM) number—which encompassed every other number assigned to anything else.
One open secret of the WTC identification effort was that we never accomplished the goal of closing the universe of known victims—that is to say, not everyone who was dead was listed on the missing persons list. We never made any effort to hide this fact, but it received little publicity. I am not speaking of being unable to identify everyone. We did not expect to ever do that. Rather, we list-compilers knew there were more victims out there than we were able to confirm as missing. In our opinion, this was one of the biggest stories of the WTC, but no one really picked up on it. Those that remained off the missing persons list included victims who had been reported, at least unofficially, but whose names, for one reason or another, we simply could not confirm.
Such was the case when we received reports from grassroots immigration organizations that undocumented workers, primarily in the food service areas of the Trade Center, had perished, but that their names were not being furnished to us because their relatives were afraid of being deported. Part of the problem, which we discovered during our negotiations with community-based groups here in New York, was that terrified family members also living here illegally would not believe that they could safely report their loved one dead without facing deportation. The group of reports that seemed most credible concerned a dozen or so undocumented Mexican food service workers. Together with Brad Billet and his outfit, the mayor’s commission to the United Nations, we at OCME tried diligently to reach out to the families of these ghost victims. We even solicited the help of the countries from which the illegal aliens had likely come to the United States so that we could at least list the names of these people who were missing and could be presumed to be among the WTC dead; but these efforts did not bring us many names or much information by which we might have been able to identify particular decedents.
As a result, I believe that there are quite a few casualties of 9/11 whose names are not being recited at the annual memorial services.
The difficulty of identifying the dead forced us into accomplishing a very important task: bringing into being a system for issuing what are called “nonphysical remains” death certificates.
A family or survivor of a decedent must have a death certificate in order to satisfy the requirements of insurance companies, mortgage holders, banks, and a whole host of other entities that control portions of the decedent’s property or access to it. Without a death certificate, for example, you can’t collect on your loved one’s insurance or have access to his or her bank accounts; your mortgage company will likely not be willing to give you a few months grace in which to replace the former breadwinner’s income stream and pay the monthly installments—and so on. A certificate would also become the key to unlocking access to the funds set up to aid WTC victims’ families.
In normal times, most certificates are issued for deaths in which there are physical remains, that is, for a body. Prior to the WTC tragedy, obtaining a death certificate in New York City without having confirmation of death by means of examining the physical remains was a long and very involved process, one that could often take as much as seven years. You reported the person missing, you exhausted all remedies to locate him or her, you made application to the Surrogate Court—usually with the assistance of a lawyer—and years after the disappearance of your loved one, the Court would direct the OCME and the city’s Health Department to issue a “certificate by judicial decree,” also known as a “nonphysical remains” death certificate. In the interim, you might well have lost your home, never collected on the insurance from the decedent, and generally entered a long and unpleasant holding pattern.
We at OCME recognized soon after the WTC disaster that the intensity of the collapse and the fires would make it impossible to collect and identify the remains of every victim. We therefore needed to set up a process that would make it possible for the families to receive a death certificate without having the physical remains present, since in many cases the death certificate was the key that would allow them to move on with their lives. This difficult endeavor quickly became our fourth major task.
Four city bureaucracies, the Surrogate Court, the OCME, New York City’s Office of Corporation Counsel (its legal department, also known as the Law Department), and the Department of Health (DOH) cooperated wonderfully in setting up a system for obtaining “nonphysical remains” death certificates. Together, we agreed that two affidavits would be created for each decedent. One was to be filled out by the decedent’s family, usually under the guidance of an attorney from the Law Department. The New York Bar Association also provided family members free legal assistance in helping them to fill out the affidavits. The “family” affidavit provided us with such information as a wife’s recollection that, for example, the husband worked as a trader at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, and had gone to work at the WTC that day, as he had done every working day at 8:00 A.M., and had called her from the office twice—once to confirm dinner arrangements, and the second time to tell her that the plane had hit, that he was going to die, and that he loved her and the kids. These affidavits, which arrived at a rate of twenty to sixty a day, contained many such stories that were utterly heartbreaking to read, and the records of such phone calls were simply devastating. It was an incredibly difficult experience, but one that left me amazed by the grace and lovingness demonstrated by the victims before their deaths and the strength that their loved ones displayed in the aftermath.
The second affidavit, which we called the “employer” affidavit, would contain information and evidence supplied by the decedent’s company or place of business, including pay stubs and the like. At OCME’s and DOH’s insistence, the body of these two affidavits had to include the following information: age, race, sex, last known address, years of schooling, military service dates, date of birth, date of death, father’s name, mother’s maiden name. In some instances, of course, these facts were not immediately available to the families and the searching took precious time. Nonetheless, we insisted on including this information because the nonphysical remains death certificates were going to be no different than the regular “remains” certificate and required these fields be filled out, as well as many other data fields containing all of the pertinent social, demographic, and statistical data that was legally required. The medical portion, the cause of death, “blunt trauma—no physical remains” and manner of death, “homicide,” were the same for every certificate. These nonphysical remains certificates were label DX—the D for disaster and the X for “by judicial decree.”
One additional line told the entire story of each person in summary—the “How Injury Occurred” section of the certificate. “Firefighter killed while responding to WTC attacks,” it would read, or “Passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which was crashed into WTC.” Many simply read, “Office worker killed in WTC attacks.” A companion box listed whether the victim had been at work at the time of death. This simple fact also could have significant consequences in terms of the type of compensation that a victim’s family might receive.
The affidavits were
compiled in triplicate, a copy for the Surrogate Court, another for OCME, and a third for the Law Department. After receiving the affidavits, the Law Department dispatched copies simultaneously to the Surrogate Court and the OCME, enabling us to prepare our response while the Court was going through its certification process. This way we would be ready to move once the Court sent over to us a judicial decree that permitted the issuance of a nonphysical remains death certificate. While the Court’s own process could take anywhere from a few days to a month, we would take much less time to complete our end. I pledged to Dr. Hirsch that within twenty-four hours of our receipt of a judicial decree we would have a death certificate for the family. It was an ambitious goal, but one that we were able to achieve.
One of the main reasons I was able to keep this promise was a wonderful woman named Katie Sullivan. A sociologist and computer science professor in Oregon, she had joined DMORT a few months before 9/11, even though she had no forensic experience—she simply wanted to help with the computer end of the organization. When the attacks occurred, she was at home watching the events on television like everyone else in America, when suddenly it occurred to her, “Oh, no—I just joined DMORT!”
Before the end of September, she was in New York, deployed by DMORT for what was supposed to be a two-week stint. Initially she was assigned to work upstairs in the DNA lab and did for the first few days, but one day she ended up in my area and her role was transformed in the course of a single meeting—all because she raised her hand.
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